Saturday, October 04, 2008

It seems that the young among the Maghrebiens, designated social outliers in French society, and socially useful as a magnet for both public pity and bigotry, have learned well from the natives by being both violent and politically venal.

In Colmar, an Alsacian tourist trap town easily confused with a cheesy cuckoo clock, the incumbent mayor had a close-rum election win overturned after it was discovered that at the last minute he had approved the long debated construction permit of a large mosque for the sake of getting the 146 votes that it took to put him over the top.

The administrative court in Strasbourg annulled the municipal elections of Colmar, stating that the outgoing mayor, Gilbert Meyer (UMP), had exerted "pressure

[ED.: vote-buying] on part of the electorate" before his victory over his opponent Roland Wagner.

Mr. Meyer has exerted such pressure by committing to submit to the City Council a proposal for a grant to build a second mosque in Colmar in a letter to the Imam Daoudi Bachir, president of the cultural association of Muslim Maghreb, a estimated the court.

This promise was only relayed to the faithful, but the opponent of Mr. Meyer was able to take a position on the subject, noted the administrative judges.

They also felt that the "hasty implementation" of work that led to organize a sports event on the eve of the second round of municipal elections and the presence at the event of Mr. Meyer "that day "were designed to influence voters in the district that would benefit from it."The constituents will be pleased to learn that in America, they call that “pork”.

Elsewhere, in this season of peace of the only religion that’s still practiced to any degree on the postmodern continent, police in Lyon are for the eighth year in a row have called out riot police because adherents are celebrating the end of Ramadan, Eid el Fitr, by getting violent.

The most serious took place between 18 hours and 19 hours between the rue de la République and rue de l'Arbre Sec in the 1st district of Lyon. A group of about ten people were arrested, including minors, for violence or rock throwing. Fights and tension, also impacting fleeing bystanders, the incidents have taken place mainly in the Presqu’île (peninsula) area of the city.

Around 4 in the afternoon, a pregnant woman aged 25 was stopped near Rue Ferrandiere, when she tried to cross the district while a brawl broke out between dozens of young people. "Her car has been shaken. She then received insults, had projectiles thrown at her, and was spat upon. "I was very scared, incredibly shocked to find myself in danger in the heart of Lyon, I have the sentence for the Muslim community when I see it" reflected the young woman who was finally helped by bystanders and a police patrol.

As every year for eight years at this time, police had set up a very important mechanism for maintaining public order, with a company of CRS police reservists and a company of mobile gendarmerie. The police were present in large numbers at Place Bellecour and around the commercial center of the Part-Dieu where the situation had seriously degenerated several years ago.

As we’ve seen before, they all appeared to be either aged revolutionaries and adolescent followers... These are the people that actually think they’re no different than Bolivian peasants, but ignore the fact that they have virtually every part of their lives subsidized or programmed in some way, have running water, electricity, education, and medical care.

The pictures say it all at the latest European “Social” Forum. The sector of the population that you don’t see there? People of working age, any appreciable number of parents, or anyone likely to be sustaining their own existence and intellect through their own effort.

It seems supporting causes that look like little other than warmed-over Marxism isn’t just par for the course with these folks, it’s a form of institutional intellectual welfare, reciting the same old recycled rants from abroad and ago, and needing a crowd to give you the beer-goggles to make yourself say it.

In fact even the musical entertainment, a combination of militant south American drummers, Joan Baez impersonators, and a bad Hip Hop act does a great deal to reflect on the state of Europe’s “Social” activism heritage – it proves that even the dead can have some political power. All you have to do to get some is go out there and march, demanding some sort of mysterious hitherto unknown of special rights for sex workers, wear an orange prisoner jumpsuit, find something outside your sphere of familiarity to get enraged about, or any other identifiable antecedent to the “happy, normal” model of being, and you too can be ‘in’.

When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said, and Barack said, ‘Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it

Lunch Bucket Joe, the left's Mr. International Statesman has proved himself once again to be a complete bufoon. When, pray tell, did the French, the Americans, or the Lebanese kick Hizballah out of Lebanon? The followers of the Hizballah ARE Lebanese, and they've virtually deposed the government at that. A trained chimpanzee could figure that out.

Not only that, he generically demand that 'others' somehow, in the form of NATO (read: Europeans) somehow do that imaginary and politically implausible thing, without it having had any sort of domestic political difficulty if Americans were deployed as part of a NATO force, or even plausible to a risk-averse European public.

If Russia was to make a similar military move into another Baltic country (Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia) all of who are NATO members, people are divided as to whether troops from their country should defend these states. Half of Germans (50%) and two in five Spaniards (40%) and Italians (39%) would oppose troops from their country defending the Baltic states while two in five French adults (41%) and just over one-third of Americans (37%) and Britons (35%) would support it.

Deluded even, to the same degree as Biden in his belief that 'others' will do something for them without questioning the risk. The only message this manages to send to anyo ne who has it in for the US or any part of the EU is “invade or attack me, I'll make sure my supporters ignore you”

With this in mind, Europeans believe Barack Obama would be better able to protect Europe’s interests with regard to Russia. Almost two-thirds of French adults (64%), three in five Spaniards (59%) and Germans (57%), just under half of Italians (48%) and 41 percent of Britons all say Obama over John McCain. In the United States, while it is close, it is a different take as 41 percent of Americans say John McCain would be better able to protect Europe with regard to Russia and 37 percent say it is Obama.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information overload. Ordinary people have hijacked strategic resources and are clogging up once carefully policed media channels.

Disturbing! Without an exclusionary gatekeeper, people get to learn. Can’t have that, now, can we?

Before the Internet, the mandarin classes rested on the idea that they could separate "idle talk" from "knowledge". With the rise of Internet search engines it is no longer possible to distinguish between patrician insights and plebeian gossip.

Emphasis mine, by the way. The intellectuals, heaven forbid, will have to interpret the veracity of information for themselves. Something any real academic or reader has always had to do to earn the respect of those whom they talk down to.

The distinction between high and low, and their co-mingling on occasions of carnival, belong to a bygone era and should no longer concern us. Nowadays an altogether new phenomenon is causing alarm: search engines rank according to popularity, not truth.

I cant imagine why this is alarming to any honest person, since academics on the make for attention have never promised any sort of truth, especially in a continent obsessed with the false intellectualism of post-modern rants and tripe as a means of trying to make the individual ranter think himself smart.

Geert Lovink’s complaint seems to have more to do with being found out and having the regard an appointment or named position in society being taken away. This is no different that the complaints of the monarchs of earlier age seeing the poplauce just as most european though seem to see the world – slack jawed and unworthy in spite of their actual achievements in the expansion of what is known and what CAN be known.

Not only has popular noise risen to unbearable levels, we can no longer stand yet another request from colleagues and even a benign greeting from friends and family has acquired the status of a chore with the expectation of reply. The educated class deplores that fact that chatter has entered the hitherto protected domain of science and philosophy, when instead they should be worrying about who is going to control the increasingly centralized computing grid.

Quite the reverse is what’s true of the state of information sharing. By including those outside of an academic, political, or literary social milieu it has become less centralized, more accessible. As it undermines the currency of a “class” (something EUvians still seem to have a bipolar relationship with), this diffusion of access to publishing thoughts takes away what many believed was the monopoly of that class – one which carries still such a narrow range of world-views that it looks monolithic, desiccated, and has nothing left to say – not until it renews itself and lets others in.

The World Wide Web, which should have realized the infinite library Borges described in his short story The Library of Babel (1941), is seen by many of its critics as nothing but a variation of Orwell's Big Brother (1948). The ruler, in this case, has turned from an evil monster into a collection of cool youngsters whose corporate responsibility slogan is "Don't be evil".

Most people are no longer interested in the ubiquitous use of the casual use of Orwell, but it seems especially specious when it’s used to criticize the enablement of access to information, and to criticize the fact that information can be judged on the motives of author. The horror of the world of Big Brother is precisely that the source of information’s intent and content were singular, something Lovink seems to find comfort in when it comes to the repugnant and lazy elite that he seems so enamored with.

As such it doesn’t take much for him to find appealing any sort of invented nonsense shaped out of ignorance of a subject and grievance about others’ success in understanding it – in short, typical French popular intellectualism. Characterized by nativism massaging paranoia about the present and future, one must recall that the queen of the beehive in his day, Mitterrand, wanted to ban the personal computer because of the irritation it might cause other monopolists: book distributer’s cartel, the newspapers, attorneys, etc. For these people, the future doesn’t represent a possibility and an chance to exercise the best moral judgment possible, it’s something to be feared.

It’s an awfully strange thing for a subculture given to admiring any sort of fake revolutionary, even the mass-murdering types.

In 2005 the president of the French Biliothèque National, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, published a booklet in which he warned against Google's claim to "organize the world's information".[2] Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge remains one of the few documents that openly challenge Google's uncontested hegemony. Jeanneney targets only one specific project, Book Search, in which millions of books of American university libraries are being scanned. His argument is a very French-European one. Because of the unsystematic and unedited manner by which Google selects the books, the archive will not properly represent the giants of national literature such as Hugo, Cervantes and Goethe. Google, with its bias of English sources, will therefore not be the appropriate partner to build a public archive of the world's cultural heritage. "The choice of the books to be digitized will be impregnated by the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere", writes Jeanneney.

What Jeanneney couldn’t understand is that the globe would hold no cultural exception for his lazy ass, and that Google was in no way trying to gather an explanatory encapsulation of global culture, and certainly wouldn’t go out of its’ way to include the authors Jeanneney holds in as high a regard in the manner one man, Jeanneney would like to see them placed. That would be up to Jeanneney, and for Jeanneney to do something about, not insist that others do it on his exclusive behalf at the expense of other great eras, ideas, and bodies of thought.

If fact the things that his thesis reveals as a failure to find in those not legally structured to look up to him and the ideas he hold to be in high regard, not that differently than Big Brother is immense. We are to believe that less is more. Fewer readers is intellectually broader. Equality of opportunity requires a narrowing of the class permitted to express itself...

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Last night a pal of single mum Yasmin, of Catford, South East London — said: “Her dad’s ashamed of her behaviour but she’d have never have become a pole dancer if he hadn’t paid for her bigger boobs.

“She was always self-conscious about her size and managed to convince him she should have it done.

“She played the daddy’s girl and said it would make her feel more of a mother when she was breast feeding her children.

“He went along with it and even went to the top London clinic with her where he paid for the surgery in cash.

“The rest of the family were set against it, but he insisted she should have her way if it would make her a better mother.

It’s not just males trying to cope with Islamist social authoritarianism and oppressiveness that get sexually frustrated... Potential drone aircraft magnet Omar Bakri Mohammed has a daughter who is also given to welfare-state parasitism. The firebrand hatemonger paid for her surgically enhanced funbags with welfare money while advocating the destruction of the British state, Israel, the US, and anyone else he though was colonizing his transplanted life in the UK, all for the sake of the Jihad.

She lives on income support and has her £900-a-month rent and £240- a-month council tax paid by the state.

Yesterday she flashed a defiant finger when asked about her career.

You read that right - In spite of having a gainful employment pole-dancing, the well “integrated” chavette still has her snout in the public trough of social support.

It would be okay if she actually looked appealing. Instead she’s even more indistinct and predictable than a garden variety porn model, except with less enthusiasm and personality. She might as well go with the chemical perma-tan and white jeans look that seems to haunt the many young British Stepford children’s attempt at allure. In short, she should go back to Russia or Venezuela and ask for her money back. The irony of turning herself into a generic commodity and little more than a selfish and demanding piece of ass, is that it doesn’t actually distance her from the likes of most women raised in the bipolar orthodoxy of the Arab world.

Elsewhere: proving once again that Europeans tend to dwell and/or sneer on either 1) personal silliness by some celeb idiot to tch-tch at or 2) the rest of the world’s matters because their lives are unchallenging, uneventful, and boring, and we all know how that can make ones’ brow feverish. Given to desperate pleas for something this results in adolescent attention-seeking behavior. Many think that something should involve napalm, but that’s neither here not there. It also causes attempts at looking intelligent by always being contrarian with the hope that there someone out there who can still be surprised. In this case, it’s a matter of authoritarian nationalist twats who think lefty economic works - endorsing a authoritarian trans-nationalist twat who think lefty economic works.

At the risk of attracting the black helicopter crowd, an interesting quote from former Speaker of the House (US) Newt Gingrich:

Gingrich was particularly critical of Paulson and the New York Federal Reserve’s earlier move, reported by The New York Times, to include Goldman Sachs’ chairman at a meeting about insurance giant AIG’s financial crisis.

"I don't understand how the president can avoid firing the Secretary of the Treasury when you have a former chairman of Goldman Sachs who wants to have unlimited ability to spend money, and you have the current chairman of Goldman Sachs, the only private-sector person in a room," Gingrich told Van Susteren.

"Two weeks later, the U.S. government put up $85 billion to help AIG, in which Goldman Sachs has a $20 billion exposure…"

Those spending any amount of time inst and amongst the "expert" and/or "brilliant" classes of either government or business would not be surprised in the least as to the underlying veracity of the above.

Monday, September 29, 2008

After decades spent constructing a shield from economic reality, designed of course to keep "the people" happy, it starts crumbling in Europe.

Who do you think will rehab quicker in this situation, those in the "wild, wild, west" of the US where nimbleness and innovation are still part of the fabric -or- those places where a sclerosis of the mind and governmentalism are still de rigueur?

Too bad those new shorting rules are in place. Those evil short-sellers may have been able to extract a good chunk of value from the falling shares instead of just watching the monies evaporate into thin air.

Chalk up another win for the unintended consequences of governmentalism!

(Mass Hysteria Update: One of the totems used here at NP as a barometer on how leftdom is "feeling" about things continues to sing the praises of a ban on short-selling of equities. Limiting the amount of liquidity in the system at a time when liquidity is in short-supply. A note to those on the left, try actually thinking versus feeling in the future, the collective we might all be better off.)

Sunday, September 28, 2008

And yet more of that impulse for “government love” nearly shot down any effort to correct it. The Democrats were mad at the idea that an executive who has the choice between taking recapitalization from the treasury and taking a golden parachute for themselves needed an enducement to act on the public's interest. What they did nearly weasel in, was that a large percentage of the revenue derived by the eventual liquidation of the Treasury's investment would go to activists acting in the favor of the Democratic party.

Just like the cause of the banking broblem itself, it was all about the class warfare taunt. “Community organizers” wanted it, and we all got it – social manipulation laws requiring underqualifying people had to be offered loans they couldn't affrord in the interest of "social levelling". The purpose was to combat redlining, another grievance recited by the left dug up from 1930’s Philadelphia which supposes that racism was behind the lending of mortgages to people able to pay them off.

See? It succeeded! The “oppressed” who could not make enough to pay back loans got them! Happy now? No? Stlll at it, oh mighty "community organizers"?

“What we have here essentially are a pair of government slush funds created in July as part of the Economic Recovery Act that pump tax dollars into the coffers of low-income housing advocacy groups, such as Acorn.”

“Acorn, one of America’s most militant left-wing ‘community activist groups,’ is spending $16 million this year to register Democrats to vote in November. In the past several years, Acorn’s voter registration programs have come under investigation in Ohio, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Washington, while several of their employees have been convicted of voter fraud…”

That’s right. Rather than returning any profits made in the long-term from the economic rescue package, Democrats want to first reward their radical allies at ACORN for their help – often illegal help – in getting Democrats elected to office. Families, seniors, small businesses, and all American taxpayers deserve better than what Democratic leaders are attempting to jam down their throats.

We've noted it before, and we'll be sure to see it again - the more Anti-American they are, the more they support Barack Obama.

In a poll asking who won the Presidential debate of the 26th, Drudge Report readers, 94% of whom were making their choice from US based IP addresses chose McCain. 34% of those polled by MSNBC viewers chose McCain, but only 20% of their sample came from within the US.

It was clear from Obama's dejected exit from the stage that he lost.

It's safe to assume that very few people in Russia, western Europe, and the near east actually saw the debate transmitted live and with real-time translation, as it would have started no earlier than 3 in the morning, the impression they're getting, if from anything at all, is from nothing other than ideologically selected and characterized snippets from news reports, and probably even from MSNBC's website itself.

More to the point, outfits like MSNBC like to casually call their poll respondents 'likely voters', dropping the phrase well after one has long forgotten the what the fine print below the poll results says.

Oddly enough, the New York Times has an editorial today asking its reader(s) to not blame the New Deal programs of the 1930's for the regulatory "failure" of the current financial problems in the US. Fine, outside of a very few aged Eleanor Roosevelt devotees and some Abraham Lincoln Brigade types, not many people in the US really give a wit about the New Deal. Most probably assume the New Deal is the latest quiz show hosted by cutting-edge comedian Howie Mandel.

Regardless, the NYT, in their most humble opinion, of course lays the blame at the feet of George W. Bush. The evidence laid out is damning to say the least:

Under a law passed in 1994, for example, the Federal Reserve was obligated to regulate banks and nonbank lenders to curb unfair, deceptive and predatory lending.

In 1995, Congress passed a law that restricted the ability of investors to sue companies, securities firms and accounting firms for misstatements and pie-in-the-sky projections.

Then, in 1999, Congress dismantled the Glass- Steagall Act, a pillar of the New Deal, which separated commercial and investment banking.

But perhaps no deregulatory effort had more catastrophic effect than the 2000 law that explicitly excluded derivatives, including those credit default swaps, from regulation under the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936.

The waning money shot linking it all together:

Indeed, it was in the Bush years that antiregulation and deregulation found full expression, fueled by an ideology that markets know best, governmenthampers markets, and problems will magically fix themselves.

This blog is certainly open to being corrected, but didn't George W. Bush take the oath of office in 2001 after stealing the election from Al Gore. At least that is the last meme we received. Is there a new take on that election that we do not know about?

So, this whole Texas Rangers thing back in the 1990's was all a ruse by W? He was actually directing the Chairman of the Fed to ignore legislation obligating it to regulate banks and nonbank lenders to curb unfair, deceptive and predatory lending? We thought he spent the whole time getting shit-faced. Whats that, replaced by another meme.

Is there a another meme we missed having Bush return to evil genius status? What happend to the "stupid chimp" meme? Maybe we should visit the US more often.